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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29198577">stop this world for five minutes (i'll tell you now)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/peaksykid/pseuds/peaksykid'>peaksykid</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Blaseball (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(it gets fixed but the injury is described), Dark Seattle, Gen, Mirrorverse AU, attack/fight that caused injuries is described in passing, cybernetic injuries/futuristic medical, mechanical gore, see notes for further explanation, this is the corporates versions of jaylen and mike not the mainverse versions</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 04:40:22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,249</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29198577</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/peaksykid/pseuds/peaksykid</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>(DARK SEATTLE/MIRRORVERSE AU)<br/>Jaylen returns to Mike's lab to report a device malfunction.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jaylen Hotdogfingers &amp; Mike Townsend</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>19</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>stop this world for five minutes (i'll tell you now)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Hi! This story is set in the Dark Seattle / Mirrorverse universe, and while it doesn't include any talk of the larger background of the AU, it is a dystopia-style bad end alternate universe setting, that deals with content warnings similar to stuff like the Hunger Games series or other dystopia media. This particular story includes some of the concepts we've been thinking about in the Garages chat about Jaylen having cybernetic arms that replaced her original hands and Mike as a mad scientist/mechanic type who creates technology for the team. It includes descriptions of bio-mechanical injuries (which do get repaired) and some talk of a fight that caused them. Let me know if there are any other content warnings I need to add.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Mike sensed the door opening before he heard or saw it, felt the air shift somewhere behind him. He paused in his work, and set the delicate metal contraption he was working on back down on the counter, but did not turn around.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The shadow projected from the fluorescent lights out in the hall outside the lab took a while to fight its way through the long stripes of shadows from the arrowsun outside the wide glass window, weaving through the stiff-edged blocky outlines of the lab stations and devices that rose up out of the floor of the workspace like the city in miniature. He could see it out of the corner of his eye, thin and curved, but hunched over, like it was holding itself together, clutching its heart close to its chest.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The thought crossed his mind that that wasn’t a good sign. He turned around, a little more quickly than he probably should, and felt the synergy flare upon recognition.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was Jaylen, and she looked...injured. He couldn’t identify immediately how so, though his diagnostic instinct raced as he glanced her over--she was as bent to the side as her shadow had mirrored, her face looked strained but resolute, like she was trying to pull the feeling in--he could feel that from her, in waves, dull violet and matte, like the color was leeching from her herself.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Jaylen--”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Sorry, I--” she coughed, and covered her mouth with her hand, and he saw in an instant what was wrong, the mangled and uneven edges of the metal of her forearms, the visual version of the loss of color he had felt from her, the dripping of pale blue viscous blood from the arrows through the rivets and between her fingers. “I hate to bother you really, if you’re busy right now I don’t want to interrupt if you’re working on something--”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“</span>
  <em>
    <span>Shit, </span>
  </em>
  <span>Jaylen, get over here,” he said, lunging around the lab table before even waiting for her to approach, unwieldy and clumsy. “Don’t even move, you’re losing blood, fucking hell,” and he pushed off the counter to give him more speed, and knocked over one of the glass flasks he’d been storing coffee in with his elbow, spilling it with a clatter all over the table. He barely noticed.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaylen was holding herself up alright--the problem seemed to be contained to her arms and nowhere else--but when he approached, she shifted and opened up to allow him to put an arm under her shoulder and support her weight. He maneuvered her into a chair he had set up by the window, grabbed a loose box for her to rest her damaged arms on, nearly stepped in the spilled coffee on his way back, but rushed back over to her anyway.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Are you alright? Are you stable? What happened?” He wanted to ask a million questions but didn’t want to overwhelm her, not while she was leaking blue all over the lab and a weak smile graced her face, the sort she got when she was particularly apologetic. He tried to limit it. “Is it okay if I touch them? I don’t want to make it worse.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She nodded heavily, then winced, as he hovered over, wrapping her metal forearms in a sort of plastic cloth and pulling the edges tight to staunch the bleeding liquid. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“One of those fucking Tigers, </span>
  <em>
    <span>bit</span>
  </em>
  <span> me, can you believe it?” She laughed, but it felt forced out of her mouth, like she was trying to spit it out. “Before you ask, the rest of everyone else is alright, they had all scattered off to chase the others and they all got away, but I was the only one that got anywhere near close.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There was a flare of pride at that, he felt it in the palms of his hands, pressing down on where her arrow should be with the cloth.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Shit, really?” he found himself saying, not even thinking to check behind him for a camera to overhear his curses. They wouldn’t care, one of his teammates was hurt. “I mean, I’m not surprised, you’re one of the best we have, but wow.” He fumbled for something else to say, to distract her to take her mind off the shock of the injury, but came up empty, any words pale and sinking through his fingers like sand.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah, it was pretty cool, actually!” Something in her brightened, and he was able to take that moment to tie off the cloth around her left arm and move away to dig into a drawer nearby, looking for a part he could replace what had been ripped to pieces with quickly.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I chased him down all the way to one of the roads leaving town, then tricked him into going into an alley and I had him cornered, I really did,” he heard her say from behind him, felt the glow of satisfaction that moment must’ve held, then a souring. “Then he flipped out on me and turned around and took a bite out of my fuckin’ arm, like some kind of asshole--” she was giggling, now, almost hysterical, the smile on her face less weak but at the same time less stable, fragile in a different sense, out of the corner of his eye.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Don’t tire yourself out,” Mike said. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Come on, idiot, say something worthwhile.</span>
  </em>
  <span> “You did good, but you need to rest for a second and let me help, ok?” </span>
  <em>
    <span>Was that too presumptuous?</span>
  </em>
  <span> “Or let someone help. But I figure you came up here to my lab instead of the hospital ward, and probably not just to tell ghost stories, so I’ll see what I can do, alright?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She looked up at him from her chair and nodded, already a little more encouraged. He just hoped he </span>
  <em>
    <span>could </span>
  </em>
  <span>help. He pushed the doubt from his mind in the hopes that no one would notice it, and focused on gathering rivets and bolts and pieces. He tried to run through his blueprints in his head, call them up clumsily from whatever database he had tossed them into, remember what pieces went where before he got anywhere near close to putting metal to metal.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He had done live maintenance on her arms before--it was the best way to make sure that everything moved smoothly together, and she could deactivate any feeling in them while he did. He just hoped that mechanism hadn’t been damaged by the attack.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He returned over to her with the parts, plus a can of some soda with a long straw, which he placed within her reach on top of the box. He checked the wrappings. The leak seemed more than stopped, the blue stain on the cloth no longer spreading, and he figured it would be safe enough to move forward.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“How are you doing? Are you alright--still with me?” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaylen looked up from her soda at him and nodded, wordless.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Can you still turn off your connection to your arms? I don’t want to hurt you while I’m putting the parts in.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She sucked air in through her teeth. “Probably. I should’ve just done that the moment I got bit, but I didn’t want to leave myself defenseless out there. Plus I still had to get in the transport.” She tensed up a bit, and Mike felt something flicker between them, and then relax. The dim blue light faded from below the cloth. “They should be off now.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He moved in closer, and slowly unwound the cloth from around the arms, which now sat cold and absent of their usual humming mechanism. Jaylen let him move them apart on their odd makeshift table--for a second, he wondered why he hadn’t grabbed an actual platform to put them on, this was awfully precarious--and let out a delayed sigh of relief. The fingers were lifeless and not curling inward with tension as they had been before, and he was able to straighten them out and check their integrity. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The damage seemed to be just past the wrists--the hands were fully intact, thankfully, and the gash was shallow enough that he would probably only have to replace a few of the panels. The distress seemed mostly to have been caused by the rupturing of some of the tubing inside, that carried her blue fluorescent blood to her hands--it had stalled now, that she had them turned all the way off, and with the panels off he was able to see where a nasty crack had split through. He whistled, surprised, the sound trailing off into an electronic whine.<br/></span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Must’ve had quite the teeth, whoever came at you. Sharper than Malik’s, anyway.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Bigger cat. Was that Ren Morin guy. I think he’s got some augmentation behind him cause he got bigger when I wasn’t looking.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Mike hummed, sealing the tubing off. “Sounds brutal. I’m glad he didn’t bite them clean off, honestly.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Well shit, I am too,” she said, looking him in the eyes, and there was a more mischievous glint there, that felt encouraging in an old familiar way. “Course you could’ve just made new ones, but then they wouldn’t have matched and I know I would’ve hated that and you probably would’ve too.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You know me too well, you know that?” he said. He took inventory of her state. Her voice was hoarse, but in a more tired way than hurt, more normal to how she always was when they came back from a hunt. He was used to seeing the rest of the team back in the barracks returning home, filing into their capsule spots, gossiping about what they’d seen and accomplished and who had gotten hits in on who. It made him miss it, being allowed out there, but also distinctly not miss it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Well, I think that’s the goal,” she said, and he felt her laugh before it left her mouth, before it chained to him too. “If we weren’t close I’d be worried.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She sighed, leaning her head back against the chair. The grey-yellow beams of the arrowsun illuminated half her face, perpetually in a dying golden hour.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Mike knew at least that he didn’t have to put on airs around her, even more than the rest of the teammates. They would all see through it, anyways--no matter how well he hid his doubts , they always bled through on the connection--but with Jaylen he didn’t even think to posture. There was no reason. They knew each other well enough that pretending was obsolete at this point.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He tightened the last panel over the repaired tubing and went on to the other arm, repeating the process, gathering a few more pieces to patch it up. She watched his hands move deftly, and he felt her eyes follow the motion.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I think you should be good now--maybe take it slow turning them back on?” he said, stepping away gingerly. He felt something stick under his foot and dimly remembered the spilled coffee. He’d deal with it later.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>An audible click, and a slight whirring, noticeable to their sensitive ears. The glow began to seep back into the wiring, filling the arrow indentation like a mold from bottom to top. They both watched as the arrow came to life again, straightening its strained tail half-way and pointing back up again, reversing course.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“That’s a good sign,” Mike said under his breath, realizing midway through his words the artificial lilt that accompanied them, and that Jaylen had said the same thing in synchronization. They looked at each other and met eyes. Blinked. Then she laughed, less frantic and more relieved, but still tired.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“That too,” she said, and carefully lifted her left hand to brush the hair from her face.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Do you want to sit for a while? I can get you some coffee.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I think I'm good for now, I should probably be getting back downstairs, actually,” she said, gingerly getting up. “I don’t want to waste any more time being unproductive, you know?” A pause. Then, more genuine, with more color in it. “Thank you, though. Really.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He nodded. He knew better than to push it. “Let me know if there are any performance issues. I can patch them up as needed.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Glad to know. This would’ve taken them hours back down at the hospital bay, they take so long to do anything.” She rolled her eyes. “Really, I don’t know what they’re doing back there.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Something grand and fantastic I’m sure,” he said, then winced, for once thinking to look around for cameras. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I mean, you’re not wrong,” she said, over her shoulder, already heading for the door. Mischief present in her smile. Noted.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You be careful now, alright? The next game’s with those fucking Rays, isn’t it? Don’t let them mess with you. They try to get in your head.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Mike, of all people you should know we all have more things in our heads than you could shake your test tubes at. The Rays aren’t anywhere near close to taking up real estate.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Alright, that one did get a laugh out of him. She seemed satisfied at that, and turned away again.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You have a good downcycle, alright?” She was already halfway out the door before he remembered to reply with an “alright, you too.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He watched her go, gait much more stable now, until her shadow shortened in its trail and dipped out of view.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thanks for reading, and thanks once again to the Garages lore-axe for having me. Title of the fic is from the song Cold Skin by To Kill a King.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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